


Ere

by chaila



Category: Queen's Thief - Megan Whalen Turner
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-27
Updated: 2011-08-27
Packaged: 2017-10-23 03:15:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/245692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chaila/pseuds/chaila
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“<i>Ere</i> translates as love, a rather ruthless love, not mercy. . . The Great Goddess of Eddis is not known for her mercy.” Attolia would never confuse love with mercy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ere

**Author's Note:**

> Written for femgenficathon 2011.
> 
> Prompt: 136) _Ask yourself three questions and you will know who you are. Ask "What do you believe in?" "What do you hope for?" But most important - ask "What do you love?"_ \-- Paullina Simons (born 1963), Russian-born American novelist, journalist and translator.
> 
> Also [here](http://chaila43.livejournal.com/144206.html) on LJ and [here](http://chaila.dreamwidth.org/105585.html) on DW.

For most of her life, men have underestimated Attolia. She has always been exceptional at making use of the tools available to her.

Her father, when forced finally to look, sees only a forgotten girl-child to be sold in exchange for a weak alliance that will temporarily defer civil war, enrich the already powerful and bleed the people dry. He packs her up amidst other gifts of gold, grain and livestock, and trades her to strangers in exchange for six months more of peace and an early, unnatural death.

When she becomes the heir whose husband will be the next king of her country, strangers bring her mother’s jewels to her on her father’s orders: earrings, necklaces and combs, smudged from the hands of her father’s many women, but still glittering in rich, deep tones. She will need them as ornaments, her father tells her, the only time he speaks to her of her new status; a princess and a queen must look the part. Attolia, then just Irene, sits calculating the value of each jewel with an appraising eye, as her new retinue of unfamiliar attendants fuss over which will look best in her dark hair.

Her first fiancé and his father look right through her, as if her mind is as dull as the pale colors she wears. Her prospective father-in-law is a greedy man, but an intelligent strategist. No man becomes the most powerful of the Attolian barons without knowing the intricacies of the alliances and rivalries, who has money and who can be bought at what price. She sits seething at the strange court, methodically spinning in the shadows and absorbing the information she needs to win the throne that is hers by right. She sews her own wedding clothes, as is the custom, thinking about the value of her mother’s jewelry. On daily walks she collects coleus leaves, whose colors are as bright and varied as any gems.

Back on her own soil on her wedding day, she waves away her attendants and slides glittering combs into her hair and a tiny bag of the powdered residue of crushed bright leaves up her sleeve. She stands still through the traditional wedding ceremony at an altar where thousands of similar sacrifices have been made to indifferent gods. Later, she sits unmoving as her own wine cup falls from her dying bridegroom’s hand onto the floor, splashing a few drops of dark red liquid onto the snow white dress that she had so carefully sewn herself.

Even then, the barons merely appraise her like a prize calf as they squabble over her throne and her country. When she confronts the man who has dared to name himself her king, she stands at her full height as she crosses the room to sit on the throne for the first time. He smiles and laughs. When her guard captain raises the crossbow, she doesn’t flinch. The fallen baron twitches as the red pools beneath him. She can smell the blood in the air and tries not to breathe it in when she speaks coolly to the rest, saying little before leaving them to deal with the dead.

They see her then, strong and unforgiving, as she intends them to, and no one smiles. She has traded her mother’s royal jewels for favors and for loyalty and with them has made herself queen.

Back in her chambers, she sits to look out her windows at the view of the city and the mountains beyond. She surveys her country—the silver river just beyond the city’s walls, the roads winding up into the hills, the glimpses of neatly lined fields glowing gold in the sun—and bows her head and swears, not by the gods but on her own honor, that no one will ever again steal anything that is hers.

***

Red has always suited Attolia, but she never wore it before she became queen. As grateful for the uses of her beauty as she has occasionally been, she has never been vain. Yet a queen must look the part.

She trades gold from her treasury for new rubies and has them fashioned into the modern headband she wears instead of a crown. Like Hephestia who ruled the old gods, Attolia swathes herself in shades of red to remind herself and her subjects of her authority; red for rubies in a crown, red for spilled wine at a wedding feast, red for blood in puddles on the floor. Like her title becomes her name, to both hide her and to make her stronger, red leaves only the queen to do what must be done; red to remember and red to forget.

She only notices the weight of the robes and jewels, their natural pull on her movements, once they are gone. At the end of long days, neck and shoulders aching from the heavy weight she wears, she sits patiently while her attendants carefully remove the velvet and the gems.

***

By the end of the second year of her reign, she has ordered the tongues of traitors cut out, caged thieves in the courtyard, and hanged six men upside down from the city walls to die. Very few people underestimate her any longer. Still fewer see her as she really is.

She rules alone on a throne rightfully hers but won again and again by blood, and she bows neither to tradition nor to the gods. She earns the support of the people and carefully extracts the obedience of unruly barons. She metes out her justice harshly, but fairly; her taxes are not more than the people can bear, and they pay for water for the fields, enough patrols to keep out most of the pirates and the raiders, and roads for buyers and sellers to get to the markets. She pays her soldiers generously and promotes men in the military according to their merit; she cares very little for their bloodline, if they are competent and loyal in her service.

She runs her own palace firmly and fairly, and if some of her attendants and servants are housed in the palace to ensure their families’ compliance with her country’s needs, she is not overly harsh in her treatment of them if she is given no reason to be.

***

The irony of modeling herself after the Great Goddess does not escape Attolia: Hephestia, born of a great and powerful union between the Earth and the Sky, and Irene, born of anything but. Hephestia’s parents, the Earth and Sky, shook the ground and heavens for generations with their feud before giving up their power to their daughter to spare their subjects. Attolia’s mother had been the daughter of a powerful baron, traded to her father after the death of the king’s first wife in a desperate attempt to shore up the power of the throne. Irene herself was a minor princess, the only product of the failed alliance, the forgotten daughter of the king's forgotten wife.

Her mother had been quiet and lonely, always among strangers, but with sharp observing eyes to the rare few who cared to notice. She served her purpose as queen well, sitting beautiful beneath heavy robes and royal jewels, seen and not heard. She had been soft and smiling in the dark, tucking her small daughter into bed and telling endless stories of her home and childhood, especially of her maternal grandmother, who had flouted the conventions of her rank and plowed the fields in trousers with the men in the years following the plague, when work was abundant and workers scarce.

The marriage had done little to reinforce the power of the throne. Her mother died of a natural illness when Attolia was very young, too insignificant, by then, to even be a target for assassins. Her death had not mattered much to anyone but her daughter.

Attolia’s father was a passive ruler, selfish and short-sighted, and far more concerned with maintaining the old power structure and his own status than with the stability of his country or its people. In keeping with his character, he had worshipped the invaders’ gods in the true Attolian style, kneeling to mouth meaningless words and expecting the empty motions of piety to demonstrate his alliance with the remote but powerful gods and to preserve his authority from those who would challenge it.

He had required his children’s attendance at temple festivals. Attolia knelt behind him twice a year as he slit the throat of the sacrificial calf at the altar and caught its blood in the ceremonial bowl, offering it to the gods in an attempt to earn their arbitrary favors. By the end of his reign, with civil war imminent, he was begging and bargaining with the gods, in the same way he bargained with the family he sold Attolia into. He traded his daughter and prayed to gods he probably didn’t even believe in, and his daughter learned the only useful thing he ever taught her: to watch, to assess the options, and then to act, not to leave the fate of herself or her country in the hands of greedy men or unfeeling gods.

Unlike her father, Attolia does believe in the gods, but she will not worship them. She will not prostrate herself at their altars to thank them for the throne she won with her own sacrifices or to beg them for the stability she builds and holds onto with her own hands. She will do what she knows must be done and her actions will succeed or not on her own strength. She keeps her country safe and whole and free; the gods have naught to do with it.

***

In her life, Attolia asks the Great Goddess for one thing, but it is a fair bargain: a temple built at the highest point in the city for a loyal boy with no sense at all. When Eugenides is cold and shivering in a locked room littered with broken glass, cursing his gods for betraying him to her, she asks the goddess to return him. She offers the trade as an equal. She does not kneel and she does not beg. She asks not from the temple, but from her own throne.

***

Red is traditionally associated with heat but Attolia has cultivated the cold. She is passionate but she is not warm.

When she touches her husband to soothe him from a nightmare before he is fully awake, he flinches exactly the way he did in her dungeons when she forced him to look at her and decided hanging was too easy a punishment, the same way he did when she looked into his face in a room that stank of blood and some indistinct scent that reminded her of spilled hair oil, before she ordered his hand cut off on her way to dinner. To others, her actions had appeared to be the result of a white-hot rage—the Thief did gall her—but she cannot fool herself or him and pretend it was not done with as much cold calculation and precise measurement of effect as every other action she takes.

She never once says she is sorry. In lieu of apologies she cannot make, she wakes coldly and silently from her ruby-tinged nightmares, lips burning, and comforts her husband when he wakes screaming from his. She dries his tears and remembers splashes on a dungeon floor and speaks his name softly into the dark until he recognizes his wife beside him and not a fiend in his dreams.

"You wore green," he murmurs, half-asleep.

"So I did," she says, and soothes him with a hand in his hair, hearing the coolness in her voice even now and thinking about the way the dark blood seeped into her pale green slippers as he did not cry out and she refused to back away.

When she touches his face deliberately when he is awake, he shivers and turns to kiss the palm of her hand. At extreme temperatures, she muses, cold and heat feel much the same.

***

They do not tell stories about her because she orders men strung up; they tell stories about her because she watches with a face of stone and never looks away or gives in as they beg and plead and attempt to justify themselves. In this too she imitates the gods; she has little time to concern herself with the fates and petty excuses of mortals. She has watched men starved and wasted away, tortured and hanged, to prove her strength to those who would betray her and threaten her power and her country with it.

Relius, her earliest and most trusted advisor, taught her the need to dole out punishments not to fit the crime, but to fit the threat that the crime posed to her authority. In the first year of her reign, he had tumbled out from beneath a wagon, muddy, ambitious and resourceful, a servant in search of a master, with no competing claims on his loyalties to be used against her.

Or so she had thought for many years, until she finds herself forced to arrest him for possible treachery with the Medes. She would never have thought him capable of it, yet he is the only one with enough trust and power to commit such treachery and hope to go undetected.

He drops to his knees at her feet in a gesture of supplication, as so many before him have done. He makes his confession, that he made a mistake and failed her but did not purposefully betray her. Any traitor would say the same. She doesn’t have the luxury of trusting him on his word. It was he who taught her to tell truth from lies when it mattered most. The truth must be obtained as all truth is revealed: through pain.

She observes as she always does, because she must. They would not fear her nearly as much if she didn't. In the past, when they were left alone after difficult moments, when she let the mask slip aside as she would not have done with anyone else, Relius, grown secure after years together, would briefly rest a supporting hand on her should before slipping away to leave her alone in her silence. He is, had been, one of the few people who would dare touch her at all, who will ever dare touch her again. That comforting hand is now swollen and bruised, and she knows from experience that he will never have the full use of it again. He has told them nothing; he lies limp on the ground before her with the smell of his own blood in the air, and still swears there is nothing else to tell. She wipes her hands on her dress, though there is no blood there.

No blood has been shed that he did not teach her to take, yet the smell makes her sick all the same. The smell is not a new one, of course; the blood of friends smells no different than that of traitors. Yet tonight, it calls up the stench of her father’s meaningless rituals, that temple-smell of blood spilled by slaughter and meekly offered in sacrifice to gods she turns from. Pain is truth, Relius had always said. His choked confession at having failed her sounds both like unfathomable pain and like the furthest thing from truth she has ever heard. She thinks again of her favorite amphora, broken, and the oil that could never be put back into the vase.

***

When Teleus too kneels before her, the captain of the guard charged with protecting her confessing his own failures, Eugenides dares to invoke the goddess against her, intending to remind her of past mistakes by the words he gives Teleus to speak. “ _Oxe Harbrea Sacrus Vax Dragga Onus Savonus Sophos At Ere,_ ” Teleus says to her, repeating the words that Eugenides had muttered brokenly, curled up on the stone floor of her dungeons while she listened alone in the shadows outside the cell. Her husband means to call up her remorse for things she might have done differently.

Attolia is not immune to regret. Guilt, however, seems to carry a self-judgment she cannot accept, and apologies imply a wish to make past deeds undone. She appreciates precision; there is much she regrets, very little for which she feels guilt, and less still that she would have done differently. The words that Eugenides gives to Teleus had not saved him from her, and she can’t bring herself to be sorry. If she had not taken his hand, she would have hanged him and felt it not at all, and so she cannot quite think it a mistake. She would never confuse love with mercy.

Still, she lets Eugenides have his leniency. In the dark of the following nights, she says nothing about it but she has nightmares more vivid than any she has had before. In her dreams, the rubies on her fingers melt like wax and the thick red liquid drips from her hands; a single drop of wine stains a white dress; blood spurts violently onto a dirty dungeon floor while she watches; she holds a goblet of dark liquid, its stench filling her nose; it falls to the floor and its wine-red contents splash onto her pale green shoes. She brings her hands, slippery with wet, to her face and leaves bloody fingerprints there; instead she wipes her hands on her dress and there the stains are indistinguishable from the deep red of the velvet.

She wakes silently with an ache in her chest. She holds onto the pain, pressing a hand to where it hurts. The dark head on the pillow next to hers appears to be sleeping, but she can't be sure. He would lie to give her this time. It is not pain to be soothed by others; she does not want it soothed. She slips from the bed to sit in her chair by the window to watch the moon illuminate the gentle rise of the land as the stars move across the sky. She waits up to listen for sounds of the first wagons on the road outside, farmers on the way to the market to make their living in this brief time of peace between inevitable wars. The ache slowly eases beneath her palm, but its ghost does not leave her.

Teleus’ pardon had been Eugenides’ but in the morning she writes out Relius’ in her own hand. She always has a blade or two about her, and as she seals the words, her hand makes a rare slip and she slices her finger on a thin knife on her writing desk. The cut is small and the blood comes slowly. She doesn’t wipe it away but watches it, wondering at its warmth. A single drop falls onto her lap, but her robe is of a deep red and the blood does not show.

She sits a few minutes longer as the blood clots, then calls her attendants to deliver her message and prepare for the day. She sits, calm and upright, face impassive, pressing her fingers against the cut to feel the small, sharp hurt of it as Phresine carefully braids rubies into her hair.


End file.
